The UX of Urban Space: Relationship Between Parents and Kids
- Irene (Shiyin Zheng)
- Nov 11, 2018
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 3, 2019
The UX of Urban Space
Team
Lara Biagini
Yu Qin
Dark (Yaqi Meng)
Jing Zhao
Irene(me)
Place
St Mary's Churchyard
We had some problems in team collaboration last week. We discussed a lot, end up going back to the very start of our discussion. We were hard-working, but we were doing nothing as well. I felt that it was not only the cultural problems but the language problems as well, making it hard for us understanding each other. Luckily, we got some solutions. We were told to set the maximum time of our discussion, and use the time counter during it. It worked quite well and we were finally doing something.
In the second week, we continued looking at the relationship between the parents and the kids. I did some literature research on this, and combining with our observation, we found that there were mainly five factors affecting the safety distance, age of the child, gender of the child, the company of the child (whether alone or with company), time (whether day or night) and familiarity of the place. (Osman, Mariana Mohamed, et al. "PERCEPTION OF PARENTS AND GUARDIANS ON SAFE DISTANCE FOR CHILDREN TO TRAVEL TO PUBLIC AREAS." PLANNING MALAYSIA JOURNAL 15.1 (2017).)
This was about the string in the demonstration model we made, then we looked at the two wood columns, the parents and the children. We found they two were looking at the distance in a different way.
To know this, we again carried out further interviews. We discussed about what we wanted to know and summarised the questions in one paper. Then we went to the park again.
Relationship between the parent and the kid
For parents, they have to see to kids. The safety distance for the parents is how far the sight is. For kids, they do care about the parents as well. They have to know where their parents are, then they would get assured even if they do not see their parents. (But when the kids get older they care about their parents less.) This also decides that the parent should stay in one place and the kid would run from one place to another.
Next, we thought about the way to present our findings. We carried out the time-limit discussion method, each of us thinking of one presentation form in a set time.
My idea
I thought about using strings in a box, from one side to the other. There could be light from the top of the inside, leaving shadows of the strings to the bottom surface. The two sides of the box would represent parents and kids respectively, and the audience could look inside of the box to feel the distance changing with the images and the sound. However, this one still needed test of the light and the shadows. In consideration of the time limitation, we did not pick this one.
We decided on making a model with Arduino showing the feelings of the parents and kids respectively. None of us had tried Arduino before, so it was a big challenge for us. Jing and I worked on the Arduino part and the left people worked on the model.
Building the model using Arduino
We learned something by ourselves the former night and went to the Lab for help the next day. At first we were thinking about making a kid's crying sound when the object touched the sensor, then we found it too difficult to make a customised sound to the speaker. We changed the sound to the indicator light. We used red, yellow, green and blue lights to show varied feelings of the parents and the kids. The two blue lights for the kids were the same.
For the sensor, we used a light sensor to simulate a on/off switch. We set an threshold for the amount of light to toggle on the light. This meant when an object was onto the sensor, the amount of the light was below the threshold, and then the light would turn on. This could look like as if there was on/off buttons there.
We two coded to add further sensors and lights onto the bread board of Arduino. We have five sensors and five different lights in total, but some of the sensors would control two lights together. Likewise, some lights would be controlled by more than one sensors. However, these two things could not be achieved at one time. So we used two red lights, two yellow lights and two blue lights.
We cut holes on the base of the model to put the sensors in, and we lift the base up, leaving space for Arduino lines and also one speaker playing the background sound. We showed safety boundaries using strings and nails.
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